Posts from November 2018

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Over the past couple years, the Creative Lab in collaboration with the Handwriting Recognition team have released a few experiments in the realm of “doodle” recognition. First, in 2016, there was Quick, Draw!, which uses a neural network to guess what you’re drawing. Since Quick, Draw! launched we have collected over 1 billion drawings across 345 categories. In the wake of that popularity, we open sourced a collection of 50 million drawings giving developers around the world access to the data set and the ability to conduct research with it.

"The different ways in which people draw are like different notes in some universally human scale" - Ian Johnson, UX Engineer @ Google

Since the initial dataset was released, it has been incredible to see how graphs, t-sne clusters, and simply overlapping millions of these doodles have given us the ability to infer interesting human behaviors, across different cultures. One example, from the Quartz study, is that 86% of Americans (from a sample of 50,000) draw their circles counterclockwise, while 80% of Japanese (from a sample of 800) draw them clockwise. Part of this pattern in behavior can be attributed to the strict stroke order in Japanese writing, from the top left to the bottom right.

It’s also interesting to see how the data looks when it’s overlaid by country, as Kyle McDonald did, when he discovered that some countries draw their chairs in perspective while others draw them straight on.

Some handy tools have also been released from the community since the release of all this data, and one of those that we’re releasing now is a Polymer component that allows you to display a doodle in your web-based project with one line of markup:

The Polymer component is coupled with a Data API that layers a massive file directory (50 million files) and returns a JSON object or an HTML canvas rendering for each drawing. Without downloading all the data, you can start creating right away in prototyping your ideas. We’ve also provided instructions for how to host the data and API yourself on Google Cloud Platform (for more serious projects that demand a higher request limit).

One really handy tool when hosting an API on Google Cloud is Cloud Endpoints. It allowed us to launch a demo API with a quota limit and authentication via an API key.

This component and Data API will make it easier for creatives out there to manipulate the data for their own research. Looking to the future, a potential next step for the project could be to store everything in a single database for more complex queries (i.e. “give me an recognized drawing from China in March 2017”). Feedback is always welcome, and we hope this inspires even more types of projects using the data! More details on the project and the incredible research projects done using it can be found on our GitHub repo.

By Nick Jonas, Creative Technologist, Creative LabEditor's Note: Some may notice that this isn’t the only dataset we’ve open sourced recently! You can find many more datasets in our open source project directory.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Google Open Source is proud to announce Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019 – the 15th year of the program! We look forward to introducing the 15th batch of student developers to the world of open source and matching them with open source projects.

Over the last 14 years GSoC has provided over 14,000 university students from 109 countries with an opportunity to hone their skills by contributing to open source projects during their summer break. Participants gain invaluable experience working directly with mentors on open source projects, and earn a stipend upon successful completion of their project.

We’re excited to keep the tradition going! Applications for interested open source project organizations open on January 15, 2019, and student applications open March 25.

Are you an open source project interested in learning more? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization and how to prepare your community and your application. We welcome all types of organizations – large and small – and are eager to involve first time projects. Each year, about 20% of the organizations we accept are completely new to GSoC.

Are you a university student keen on learning about how to prepare for the 2019 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. You should read the student guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in March. You can also get inspired by checking out the 200+ organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2018 as well as the projects that students worked on.